The colorful Verizon CEO unloads with comments on how we have the best …

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Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sat down for an on-the-record conversation yesterday at the Council for Foreign Relations, and he pulled no punches: the US is number one in the world when it comes to broadband. We're so far ahead of everyone else, it's "not even close."

Given that a central piece of the National Broadband Plan was concerned with America's poor showing on broadband metrics, this was an intriguing claim to make. In essence, Seidenberg hauled out one of the NBP's main reasons for existence and just kicked it in the groin. Perhaps we don't even need a national plan?

Seidenberg: Anytime government—whether it's the FCC or any agency—decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose. So this FCC decided that speed of the network was the most important issue. So that's all they measured.

So they will say, if you go to Korea or you go to France, you can get a faster Internet connection. Okay? That could be true in some companies—in some countries. The facts are that, in the US, there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe.

In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.

Let's take wireless, for example. Everybody says the European system was kind of better. Well, that's very interesting. If you look at minutes of use, the average American uses their cell phone four times as much—four times as much—as the average European. If you look at Europe, they publish penetration rates of 150 (percent), 160 (percent), 170 percent meaning that people have more than one phone, two phones, three phones.

You know why? Roaming rates are so high. My guess is you probably have two or three different phones to carry to—to use in different countries because your roaming rates are so high. And you say, yes.

So my point is it's a fallacy to allow a regulatory authority to sit there and decide what's right for the marketplace when it's not even close.

[WSJ executive editor Alan] Murray: So on the measures that matter most to you, where does the United States rank in terms of—

Seidenberg: One. Not even close.

Murray: Number one?

Seidenberg: Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined. All. We have—if you look at smart phones—not us, Apple, Google—they have exploded this market in the US. Ask any European if they're not somewhat envious of the advancements of smartphone technology in the US. So it just seems to me this is just not even close.

In any event, we also learned that Seidenberg has an iPad, but that he didn't stand in line for it.

Murray: You didn't stand in line on Saturday?

Seidenberg: No, I had somebody else stand in line. (Laughter.) But we had people standing in line.

Finally, if you're a high-bandwidth user of Verizon's smartphone data services, the company will soon hunt you down and throttle you. (The company has long had a maximum transfer limit on monthly data plans.)

Seidenberg: But when we now go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that—who knows what they're doing—those are the—

Murray: It's video, right? I mean, it's video.

Seidenberg: But those are the people we will throttle and we will find them and we will charge them something else.

Seidenberg is a colorful guy, and the interview is worth reading and watching in full. In particular, look out for his answer to the question, "What's a cable splicer?"